April 25, 1999

Gimme Shelter

By BILL SHARP

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG
By Andre Dubus III.
Norton, $24.95.

ndre Dubus 3d's second novel, ''House of Sand and Fog,'' describes in sensitive detail how otherwise normal people employ society's rules and systems to dismantle one another's lives -- it's about good people gone crazy. An Iranian immigrant, Col. Genob Sarhang Massoud Amir Behrani, accustomed to the trappings of power, now works at menial jobs. He seizes an opportunity to make money by purchasing, at a county auction, a nice bungalow in Corona, Calif. Kathy Lazaro, who lost the bungalow because of a bureaucratic tax error and whose husband has abandoned her, struggles to reclaim it. When a deputy sheriff named Lester Burdon becomes involved, he falls in love with Lazaro, losing everything else he values in the process. Dubus builds a sturdy narrative about how these characters' visions of the American dream (shelter, security, even love) collide and collapse. Set amid the frequent, flowing fogs and unsteady sands of Pacific suburbia, the novel examines what happens when ordinary men and women move across that tenuous barrier between the normal and the irrational. This is a story, told in highly visual, descriptive language, about how people you might choose to be your neighbors are repeatedly trapped by circumstances and transformed by events until finally they can -- and do -- destroy one another.